The term, Digital transformation, has been much maligned and misused by everyone from a consultant to a developer to a technology leader. It has been used to describe anything from creating a website to incorporating data analytics to developing a social media strategy to just plain digitization of old paper records.

However, a truly transformative enterprise digital experience can be achieved only when everyone in the organization feels the change. In essence, enterprises should start their digital transformation process with their employees.

There are lot of ways you can engage your employees, but make sure you have at least accomplished the following three :

Emancipate your employees to kindle their innovation nerve, by sharing access to digital assets through APIs

Engage your employees, to ideate, collaborate and share ideas

Empower your employees, to give shape to their ideas through a low code app development platform

Emancipate your employees with an API management platform

Enterprise digital assets can be anything from list of all employees to list of all items procured to list of all vacation data to list of all products that the organization sells. Not all data will be relevant to everyone. For instance, sharing of payroll compensation data with employees will not be such a great idea.

Sharing digital assets with external entities to promote additional revenue channel or engage customers and partners to create apps are now ubiquitous among enterprises. Usually the digital assets are API’fied and shared with the external entities to consume. An API Management platform is usually deployed to API’fy the digital assets, monetize using plans, and configure security and data governance policies. Create a set of API access plans for employees and share these APIs with the employees, through a dedicated employee API portal.

Engage your employees with a collaboration platform

We are in a digital era and having a collaboration platform within an enterprise seems to be a no-brainer. Still there are many organizations out there with no platform to engage their employees. There are many platforms like Slack, Yammer for your employees to collaborate and unleash their creativity.

Engage your employees constantly, asking for their opinions on issues you are facing, announce new customer wins, conduct polls – make them feel interested and that they are wanted. Listen to your employees, you will find some amazing idea emerging from them. These new ideas and innovation are going to take your organization to the future.

Empower your employees with an innovation platform

So, you have unleashed the plethora of enterprise digital assets through the API management platform and started to engage your employees through a collaboration platform. What next? What if one of your employee has a great idea that he wants to see it materialize as an app?

Organizations should empower their employees with the fastest path from an idea to an app. They should break the shackles of the employee and remove all hurdles – typically a dependency on technical skills and resources – to create and deploy an app from an idea. This is what is called an Innovation-Ecosystem.

Invest in a low code app development platform that encourage employees with no technical skills to get involved, create and go-live with an app. Low code app development platform typically works on a visual development approach with simple drag and drop of UI components, with focus on end user experience rather than technology. Low code platform is the magic pill that is needed to harness the innovation potential within an enterprise. In short, they are the new age Enterprise Innovation Platforms.

Some of the world’s biggest business and technology disruptions started internally within an organization. The most glaring example of that phenomena is the Amazon AWS, which was piloted and was used as dog-food internally within the organization before it revolutionized the world with its cloud services. It’s sort of criminal if enterprises don’t harness the innovation potential of their employees, and the best way to enable the innovation ecosystem would be to emancipate, engage and empower your employees. Try it out for this 2017.